Albuquerque, Lead the Way!

Fr. Frank PavoneNational Director, Priests for Life

As I often say, the last thing abortion supporters want to talk about is abortion.

The level of abstraction in which defenders of abortion take refuge is at times as comical as it is tragic and irresponsible. Take, for instance, Daniel Maguire’s book Sacred Choices. Rather than face up to what the “choice” of abortion is and describe it concretely, the author discusses why he thinks “the Roman Catholic position on abortion is pluralistic” and writes about things like Pope Gregory IX’s Decretals of 1230, or the Christian Penitentials of the early Middle Ages, or “global poisoning.” How about describing the poisoning of the child in the womb? How about describing what the abortionists say about abortion before trying to justify it by an abstract comparison of Roman Catholic statements or of “Dharma,” “Karma,” “Ahimsa,” “Yin and Yang,” and “Zakat and Hay’a”?

Or take Daniel Dombrowski and Robert Deltete’s book A Brief, Liberal, Catholic Defense of Abortion. To give you a taste of how unwilling these authors are to actually describe the procedure they claim to defend, consider that in a chapter titled “Importance of Temporal Asymmetry,” they say, “[A]s Thomists might put it, nerve cells alone do not constitute the sense organs that provide the dispositio materiae for hominization to occur.” (p. 56). Enlightening. How about exploring the “asymmetry” that takes place when an unborn little girl’s arm is twisted and pulled off the rest of her body by the surgical forceps?

No doubt, those who are trying to keep voters from voting to protect such children in the city of Albuquerque this Tuesday (November 19, 2013) will resort to abstract arguments and talk about anything except the violence that the voters can now bring to an end.

The voters of Albuquerque will be able to enact, on the local level, a measure that protects children in the womb who can feel pain (that is, from 20 weeks of fetal age forward). These children would be protected from the forceps of the abortionist who, in these late term abortions, goes into the womb, grabs an arm or leg, and tears it off the living child. It's barbaric.

And it's true. Consider this quote from a well-known medical textbook on abortion:

"The procedure changes significantly at 21 weeks because the fetal tissues become much more cohesive and difficult to dismember. …. The calvaria [head] is no longer the principal problem; it can be collapsed. Other structures, such as the pelvis, present more difficulty….A long curved Mayo scissors may be necessary to decapitate and dismember the fetus…" (From the medical textbook Abortion Practice – Dr. Warren Hern, p.154)